'Tis the Season: The Perl Advent Calendar

Tip of the Trade: Less chocolatey, but more useful. Since 2000, the Perl Advent Calendar has been providing a useful Perl module each day from December 1 through Christmas Eve.

I've talked about Perl quite a lot in recent columns, largely because it's
still an incredibly useful language for sys admins. On a seasonal Perl note,
the Perl Advent Calendar has been
going since 2000, and it provides a Useful Perl Module for every day between the
1st and the 24th of December. Less chocolatey than your average advent
calendar, but possibly more useful.

Some of the useful ones so far in this year's calendar:

local::lib for
managing local library installs. Best practice is not to install modules
from CPAN as root; instead, you can use the system perl and keep your own
CPAN directory under your home directory. This tool helps you manage
that.

Devel::Trace for easy
debugging fun. You can use it as a command-line option instead of adding
print statements into your code.

pmtools for finding
out information about installed perl modules. pminst will search
for modules matching the given search string, pmpath will locate
a module for you, and there are other options available as well.

Juliet Kemp has been messing around with Linux systems, for financial reward and otherwise, for about a decade. She is also the author of "Linux System Administration Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach" (Apress, 2009).

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